GuestColumn

BY TOBY CONSIDINE

SLIM BIM:
Getting Elephants to Dance
Two different specifications, the Army, and others are pushing
building information toward the future.

In a recent article titled, Is progress slowing, Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, writes that the technology
process of big physical things has not kept pace with the
quantum-scale world of IT. Karlgaard goes on to say that in the next
50, the realm of big things will speed up as it melds with the world
of IT. He predicts that this intersection is where big money will be
made in the next generation. Of course, I began pondering how this
intersection will happen in the big physical things we call buildings.
Engineering information is document-oriented. Large documents, even sheaths of documents, are exchanged, specifying in
great detail exactly what to do, and how to do it. Modern information technology (IT) is based on services. Service exchanges
are minimal, the smallest exchange able to specify results, and do
not specify the means of performance at all.
For the last 50 years, IT has moved far faster than have engineered systems, the things we can touch, inhabit, or ride around
in. For the next 50 years, when engineered systems will need
to evolve as fast as IT has for the last 50, we will need a middle
ground, between document and service call. This is the challenge
of configuration as shared configuration will enable big systems
to interact as nimbly as IT does today.
Buildings are big systems and are composed of big systems
that must begin to interact with the IT-based systems of their
occupants. The systems of the occupants will change many
times during the life of a building. If we are to meet national
and international energy goals, the collection of systems in each
building will change frequently as well. These systems will interact through services, simple calls conveying only requests and
results. Before they can communicate with each other as services,
each must learn about the other. System configuration is when
the systems learn the information each needs to request services
from the others. This information must be non-specific, to avoid
the complexity of details. This information must be specific,
cataloguing service entry points and potential performance.
For buildings, designed by architects and engineers, the
design and specification uses building information modeling
(BIM). These are traditionally very large and cumbersome files.
The National BIM Specification (NBIMS) describes documents
based on the international foundation classes (IFCs). The IFCs
are too cumbersome for exchange, so NBIMS specifies Information delivery models (IDMs) for each structured hand-off of
information, and a model view for each IDM. These information exchanges are detailed and overly specific. They rely on
document-centric notions of XML from long ago, seen as a
replacement for large documents in SGML. The IDM for each
stage of a project is different, even if the information is essentially the same.
The problem is, no one outside of the architecture and con-

24

En gi n eer ed S y stem s

August 2012

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struction communities uses these approaches, and few seem
willing to adopt them.
Recently, members of the National Institute of Building Science (NIBS) have worked on the hand-off of information at the
end of a construction project to the maintenance management
system (CMMS). They have developed the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie). COBie lists the
spaces and their fittings, the systems, and the spaces they support, and the equipment in each system with its maintenance
requirements and spare parts. Each of the market leaders in
CMMS already supports COBIE import. Maintenance staffs have
reported replacing weeks of error-prone hand entry with 15
minutes of COBIE import and then have had their PM and spare
parts management ready to go.
Other systems could benefit by importing COBIE as well.
Building owners often run many line-of-business (LOB) systems,
often selected by different parts of the company, from different
vendors. Asset management, capital renewal, and the registrars
classroom scheduling each have its view of the core facility
information in COBIE. An owner may outsource maintenance to
several different businesses that need to share information. The
enterprise scheduling software, used to schedule staff and meetings, has its own view of the same data. If the initial configuration of each system is based on the same COBie data set, if each
system uses the same identities for spaces and systems, then these
systems will be ready to exchange service calls sharing expectations, requests, and schedules.
A report from NREL released last spring defined the building
service interface (BSI), a standard for interacting with building
systems from non-building applications. The report recommended that each BSI be able to share a light-weight BIM, i.e.,
to be able to provide, on demand, a description of the space it
supports, the systems it controls, and the relationship between
systems and space. In the future, this lightweight BIM is likely to
be part of minimum commissioning standards to get LEED or
other environmental certification.

GuestColumn
A be
bett
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ay to th
thin
ink
k of COB
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hat
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STEP INTO A SLIM BIM
Mary Ann Piette, staff scientist at Lawrence
Berkeley Labs and director of the Demand
Response Research Center, has called these
light-weight models Slim BIM. Today,
there are two well-known specifications for

Slim BIM: COBIE and GBXML.

Green Building XML (GBXML)
is already well known to the building
automation community. GBXML was
originally developed to prepare energy models. GBXML has an easily used

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26

En gi n eer ed S y stem s

August 2012

schema that is maintained by the nonprofit Open Green Building XML Schema
(www.gbxml.org). GBXML has become
the de facto standard for exchanging
information between engineering analysis tools. GBXML is typically produced
by CAD software including applications
from Autodesk, Bentley, and Graphisoft.
(In each of these, there is a command
similar to Export GBXML). GBXML is
used by energy modelers, HVAC design
tools, ductwork CAM tools, and many
others. GBXML is so well accepted, in
part, because its schema is specified using
modern tools that are easy for software
developers to use.
COBIE, the other Slim BIM, has found
a harder path to wide acceptance. Much
of the COBIE produced today is of poor
quality and semantically incomplete.
Within BIM, information is exchanged
using the standard for the exchange of
product model data (STEP). STEP is able
to convey almost any kind of information, including detailed three dimensional data. The problem is, most users
of this information do not want complete specification and wide extensibility; they need terse, validateable information exchanges. Most users do not
want detailed purpose-built information
exchanges developed slowly in committee; they need ready-to-use exchanges
that suit a variety of purposes. COBIEs
slow uptake epitomizes the cultural and
technical differences between the engineered world and commercial IT.
A better way to think of COBIE is what
your building commissioning data should
look like. The hand-off from design and
construction gives you a good starter set.
Today, that set is usually incomplete and
must be augmented before use. In retrocommissioning, the set is empty, and the
commissioning agent must construct it
from scratch. If your maintenance management system could export COBIE, it
would provide the retrocommissioner
with a head start, producing a more complete report more quickly.
COBIE would face less cultural resistance if it looked more like other interdomain information exchanges. Some
proponents have claimed that there is a
COBIE XML format already. COBIE was
initially described as a spreadsheet of the
data you need to operate the building.

GuestColumn
Accordingly, standard Excel templates for COBIE are available. Today, the XML representation of COBIE is the XML
representation of a Microsoft Office [Excel] document. As this
format is not very useful, most COBIE is produced as hard to
understand, hard to verify CSV files or STEP text. The only
COBIE verification tool that I know is offered by Onuma Planning Systems (http://www.onuma.com/products/OpsAndCobieValidate.php).
The Armys Construction Engineering Research Lab (CERL)
is a pioneer in using construction information to improve building design, acquisition, and operations. To CERL, improved
operations are central to sustaining facilities not only during
lean budgets, but also to sustain mission support. CERLs PROJNET system, used by thousands of organizations, is the leading
producer and user of COBIE. PROJNET maintains an internal
XML representation of COBIE, one that is not now part of the
specification.
When CERL releases its XML representation of COBIE, I
predict it will soon become the dominant form for information
exchange. A version of COBIE that is as easy to use, and as clear
to understand as the GBXML schema will find rapid acceptance throughout operations. CAD vendors that produce poor
or incomplete COBIE today will up their game. Current CAD
systems require a few simple early design decisions to be able

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to produce good COBIE; designers who skip that step will find
themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Even the mash-up approaches to BIM will benefit. A CMMS
that can export well-formed COBIE will be able to export information to cloud-based BIM. Mash-ups between 3-D building
models and energy management systems will become common
and expected. Well-formed, validate-able COBIE will make
building information more visible than it has ever been, visible
to the right user, at the right time, with the tools of that users
choosing.
As these approaches replace the one-time, hard-to-perform
integrations of today, BIM and system integration will become
rapid and easy. Cloud-based techniques will reduce the costs of
technology changes within each building at the same time as
they expand the owners awareness of these changes. Shareable
configuration is the path to rapid secure service integration.
And if Rich Karlgaard of Forbes is correct, Slim BIM, COBIE
and GBXML just may be the key to big money in the next generation. ES

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